Neuromarkers of Social Coordination: A Dynamical Approach

描述（由申请人提供）：本申请解决了一个对理解人性和整个社会神经科学领域具有重要意义的基本问题：“人类之间真正的社会互动与其他感知-运动互动的区别是什么？“理解人脑内部和人脑之间的协调是如何发生的，对NIMH的基础和临床神经科学使命至关重要，原因是皮质和皮质下区域之间协调互动的中断以及神经整合的崩溃被认为是主要神经精神疾病如精神分裂症和自闭症的核心。我们的目标是：1）确定大脑区域如何在个体大脑内以及参与社会环境的大脑之间耦合和解耦的神经行为机制; 2）澄清参与社会行为互动的个体之间的信息耦合的性质。这项工作将由一个专门的跨学科研究人员团队进行，他们的专业知识涵盖认知神经科学，心理学和物理学。它建立在我们最近发现的大脑中的振荡复合体的基础上，并深入探讨了这种复合体可能作为社会行为的特定神经标志物。拟议的研究使用行为方法和复杂的计算分析，结合双高密度EEG电极阵列，开发用于同时记录交互对人的大脑活动，以揭示社交信号在大脑中的处理位置以及它们如何在个体之间动态耦合。协调动力学的新概念和分析框架被用来探索认知（大脑内）和社会（共享大脑之间）的神经表征假设为社会协调的基础。协调动力学提供了理论概念，方法和生态有效的范式来解决大脑中和跨大脑的大规模整合是如何完成的这一悬而未决的问题。这项研究代表了第一次尝试将动力系统分析纳入有意识的，相互作用的人类社会介导的神经生理活动的研究。揭示社会交往中个体协调人类行为的神经生物学机制是理解神经精神疾病的重要一步，并可能导致更有效的药理学和行为学相关治疗的发展。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application addresses a fundamental question of significance to understanding human nature and the entire field of social neuroscience: "What distinguishes a true social interaction between human beings from other perceptuo-motor interactions?" Understanding how coordination occurs both within the human brain and between human brains is vital to the basic and clinical neuroscience mission of NIMH, The reason is that disruptions of coordinative interactions among cortical and subcortical areas and the breakdown of neural integration are thought to lie at the heart of major neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. We aim to 1) identify the neurobehavioral mechanisms underlying how brain regions couple and decouple both within an individual brain and between brains engaged in social settings and 2) clarify the nature of the informational coupling between individuals engaged in social behavioral interactions. The work will be carried out by a dedicated interdisciplinary team of researchers whose expertise spans cognitive neuroscience, psychology and physics. It builds upon and explores in depth our recent discovery of an oscillatory complex in the brain that may act as a specific neuromarker of social behavior. The proposed research uses behavioral methods and sophisticated computational analyses in combination with dual high density EEG electrode arrays developed for the simultaneous recording of brain activity from interacting pairs of people to uncover where social signals are processed in the brain and how they become coupled dynamically between individuals. The novel conceptual and analytic framework of coordination dynamics is used to explore cognitive (within brain) and social (shared between-brain) neural representations hypothesized to underlie social coordination. Coordination dynamics provides theoretical concepts, methods and ecologically valid paradigms to attack the outstanding question of how large scale integration in the brain and across brains is accomplished. The research represents a first attempt to incorporate dynamical systems analysis into the study of socially-mediated neurophysiological activity in conscious, interacting humans. Uncovering the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie coordinated human behavior in an individual during social interactions constitutes a major step toward understanding neuropsychiatric disorders and is likely to result in the development of more effective pharmacological and behaviorally relevant treatments.